My father in law sent me a link via e-mail entitled "giving." I read through it and this is what it ended with:
Do you want to be happier?
Dont pray for blessings; pray for important work to do.
Don't pray for prestige; pray for a place to serve.
Don't pray for more things to use; pray to become more useful.
Don't pray for greater pleasure; pray for greater purpose.
Don't pray for an easier path; pray for joy on the journey, wherever it leads.
If you do, I believe your prayers will be answered.
I want to pray like that.
Julie
Monday, July 25, 2011
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Just some recent pics.....
A couple weeks back we went to Kings Island with Jason and Jami and went to a Toby Mac and Newsboys concert. We rode rides during the day and stayed late to watch the concert. It was super fun and super hot. It was great to spend time with just the older kids, we don't do that a lot. I have learned that while I still consider myself a thrill seeker at heart, well, my stomach doesn't always agree. Bummer.
Here is the concert!
Leah, Logan, Ethan and Sophie waiting in line for a ride. FYI, this was the line where a very stinky, hairy guy had no sense of personal space. Then, said guy sneezed all over me. No lie. Totally grossed me out. EW!
This is Leah's yeast bread place setting from last week. Simple and lovely I think.
Leah with her place setting, right before judging. Really the judging has a lot to do with how thoroughly you fill out your book, how well you test on the skillathons, your interview, your place setting and it is almost as if how your food tastes is the least of their worries. Trust me, you want it to taste good, but it is more about what you learned in the process. Leah won't even take food to the Ohio State Fair for judging. With that being said, her cinnamon rolls were amazing! After we were all done, the judge came back up to her and asked for another cinnamon roll for the other judges to try. Um yes, this will be our new cinnamon roll recipe.
Not the best picture, but this will probably be Leah's silky fair trio (two hens and a rooster). See how red the comb is on the roo? Not such a good thing, but we are unsure how big of a deal it is.
Here is the concert!
Leah, Logan, Ethan and Sophie waiting in line for a ride. FYI, this was the line where a very stinky, hairy guy had no sense of personal space. Then, said guy sneezed all over me. No lie. Totally grossed me out. EW!
This is Leah's yeast bread place setting from last week. Simple and lovely I think.
Leah with her place setting, right before judging. Really the judging has a lot to do with how thoroughly you fill out your book, how well you test on the skillathons, your interview, your place setting and it is almost as if how your food tastes is the least of their worries. Trust me, you want it to taste good, but it is more about what you learned in the process. Leah won't even take food to the Ohio State Fair for judging. With that being said, her cinnamon rolls were amazing! After we were all done, the judge came back up to her and asked for another cinnamon roll for the other judges to try. Um yes, this will be our new cinnamon roll recipe.
Not the best picture, but this will probably be Leah's silky fair trio (two hens and a rooster). See how red the comb is on the roo? Not such a good thing, but we are unsure how big of a deal it is.
This week will be a bit of a break before a crazy couple weeks. Next week will be down right nuts!
Julie
Friday, July 22, 2011
Chatty Asher and 4H.
This has been a very busy week. Leah and Logan had their 4H skillathons Monday and Thursday evening and Leah had her non livestock judging Wednesday and Thursday. Plus, we meet over at our advisors house here in a couple hours to work on our fair booth. Throw into that White Park calves jumping the fence two different times and starting the timed AI's for our 3 White Park Mama's and well, it has been nuts this week. Oh and plus I got poison ivk/oak so badly that I had to go to the Dr. and get a script for an oral steriod. I feel like the steriod it just keeping the itching at bay and I think it is making my stomach upset and keeping me from sleeping well. So, there you have it, my very large "this week had been nuts" vent.
On the brighter side though, the poison is drying out, the calves are back in their pasture (for now), mama cows are experiencing their first breeding, at our hands, and pretty much the dreaded part of 4H is over for the kids (judging and skillathons). Now they have to show their animals at the fair which will be a new thing, especially for Logan, but that is fun also for them. And, the kids did great this week. We won't know their skillathon scores until fair, but they pretty much tell them how they did on all but a couple parts and Leah and Logan did great. Also, Leah won her nutrition project again for her yeast breads and will be going to the Ohio State Fair for the second time in a row. She really wanted that and worked really hard for it. Yeah Leah!
The 4 little kids, well, they unfortunately have been just drug everywhere this week. I feel bad for them, although they are troopers and did well to occupy themselves. It is a good thing Asher loves his car seat! I think we are going to take all the kids tubing down Mad River Sunday. It will be a great break from all this and sounds like so much fun!
Oh and speaking of Asher, he is turing into a little parrot. He repeats almost anything you tell him to. The little kids have great fun with this, especially Anna. She gets him going on about his nose, eyes, mouth, etc. I think sometimes she gives him a little too much info and it confuses him, but he loves it. He repeats pretty much anything we say now too. In general he just talks a LOT. For a while I just blew it of some as jibber jabber, but then I realized that if I really listened, he was saying a few real words in there. It is a hoot though to hear him carry on. Asher still loves to scream which can be nerve wracking and is proving to be difficult to break. He screams when he's sad, but he mostly screams when he is playing or happy. What do I do about that?
Asher adores daddy (who doesn't in this family) and totally on his own he has affiliated the Under Armour sign for daddy. I didn't believe it when I first saw him do it, but sure enough he is obsessed with it now. He sees the sign, points at it and yells, "see daddy, see daddy" all happy and excited. It is really, really funny and well, weird for lack of better words. I guess I didn't realize Ryan wore that much Under Armour gear. Asher will go nuts though when he sees that sign anywhere, not just on Ryan. :)
Well time to get out of bed and start my day. It will be a good day I am sure. You know even when my life seems crazy and stressed (which this week has really stressed me out), I am so grateful that when I take just a moment to reflect, it only takes half a second for God to remind me how blessed I am. I know that I live a blessed life, but sometimes in the midst of just living, I forget. Praise God that He reminds me. Praise God that I get to wake up to six beautiful kids every morning and a husband that I have adored now for over 20 years. Life is good, crazy, but good.
Julie
On the brighter side though, the poison is drying out, the calves are back in their pasture (for now), mama cows are experiencing their first breeding, at our hands, and pretty much the dreaded part of 4H is over for the kids (judging and skillathons). Now they have to show their animals at the fair which will be a new thing, especially for Logan, but that is fun also for them. And, the kids did great this week. We won't know their skillathon scores until fair, but they pretty much tell them how they did on all but a couple parts and Leah and Logan did great. Also, Leah won her nutrition project again for her yeast breads and will be going to the Ohio State Fair for the second time in a row. She really wanted that and worked really hard for it. Yeah Leah!
The 4 little kids, well, they unfortunately have been just drug everywhere this week. I feel bad for them, although they are troopers and did well to occupy themselves. It is a good thing Asher loves his car seat! I think we are going to take all the kids tubing down Mad River Sunday. It will be a great break from all this and sounds like so much fun!
Oh and speaking of Asher, he is turing into a little parrot. He repeats almost anything you tell him to. The little kids have great fun with this, especially Anna. She gets him going on about his nose, eyes, mouth, etc. I think sometimes she gives him a little too much info and it confuses him, but he loves it. He repeats pretty much anything we say now too. In general he just talks a LOT. For a while I just blew it of some as jibber jabber, but then I realized that if I really listened, he was saying a few real words in there. It is a hoot though to hear him carry on. Asher still loves to scream which can be nerve wracking and is proving to be difficult to break. He screams when he's sad, but he mostly screams when he is playing or happy. What do I do about that?
Asher adores daddy (who doesn't in this family) and totally on his own he has affiliated the Under Armour sign for daddy. I didn't believe it when I first saw him do it, but sure enough he is obsessed with it now. He sees the sign, points at it and yells, "see daddy, see daddy" all happy and excited. It is really, really funny and well, weird for lack of better words. I guess I didn't realize Ryan wore that much Under Armour gear. Asher will go nuts though when he sees that sign anywhere, not just on Ryan. :)
Well time to get out of bed and start my day. It will be a good day I am sure. You know even when my life seems crazy and stressed (which this week has really stressed me out), I am so grateful that when I take just a moment to reflect, it only takes half a second for God to remind me how blessed I am. I know that I live a blessed life, but sometimes in the midst of just living, I forget. Praise God that He reminds me. Praise God that I get to wake up to six beautiful kids every morning and a husband that I have adored now for over 20 years. Life is good, crazy, but good.
Julie
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Our happenings around the house.....in pictures.
So I finally got some pictures of everyday stuff around here.
Today we hosted the 4H meeting. We had it in the barn and it was hot. Very hot. We got a lot done though. This is our last official meeting before fair, so we had a bunch to cover (see how great the camper fits in the barn). Our 4H leaders are a great couple that we enjoy a lot.
The front/side. I love our porch.
Our sweet little twins. Really, these little girls are just precious (as far as animals go). They come right up to you in the field, even Goofy, who was super skiddish when she first came here. Sparky is in the front of the picture and she had a longer snout and darker ears/nose. Goofy is in the back of the pic.
This years garden finally totally weeded for the the first time. Whew! The first row in this pic is the kids' row (cherry tomatoes, watermelons, pie pumkins and cucumber). There are also some cabbage in there (not the kids'). The next row is green beans, the closest row is beets and onion, but the onions are doing aweful. I will not be doing those again. This will be year 2 for failed onions. Two strikes and your out around here.
The first tomatoes turning.
My cukes. I am loving the trellis.
The whole garden.
Poor Patriot wishing he was out.
Now he is happy.
Leah's fair silkies.
The white chicken in this pic is one of the Delewares we hatched here. Unfortunately, it appears to be a rooster.
Well, that's all I got for now. The next few weeks will be pretty busy. 4H skillathons and judgings are all next week. The week after that we will be getting the fair booth ready and the animals to the fair. The week after that is the fair. I think we are pretty ready though and hopefully things will go without a hitch.
Today we hosted the 4H meeting. We had it in the barn and it was hot. Very hot. We got a lot done though. This is our last official meeting before fair, so we had a bunch to cover (see how great the camper fits in the barn). Our 4H leaders are a great couple that we enjoy a lot.
A picture of the outside of the barn. This is the east side. Yep, our yard on this side is completely destroyed. That is to be fixed this fall.
The front/side. I love our porch.
Our sweet little twins. Really, these little girls are just precious (as far as animals go). They come right up to you in the field, even Goofy, who was super skiddish when she first came here. Sparky is in the front of the picture and she had a longer snout and darker ears/nose. Goofy is in the back of the pic.
This years garden finally totally weeded for the the first time. Whew! The first row in this pic is the kids' row (cherry tomatoes, watermelons, pie pumkins and cucumber). There are also some cabbage in there (not the kids'). The next row is green beans, the closest row is beets and onion, but the onions are doing aweful. I will not be doing those again. This will be year 2 for failed onions. Two strikes and your out around here.
The first tomatoes turning.
My cukes. I am loving the trellis.
The whole garden.
Samson, Logan's fair beef feeder.
Poor Patriot wishing he was out.
Now he is happy.
Leah's fair silkies.
The white chicken in this pic is one of the Delewares we hatched here. Unfortunately, it appears to be a rooster.
Well, that's all I got for now. The next few weeks will be pretty busy. 4H skillathons and judgings are all next week. The week after that we will be getting the fair booth ready and the animals to the fair. The week after that is the fair. I think we are pretty ready though and hopefully things will go without a hitch.
Julie
Our first E-Section.
Meet Uno...........
We tried to incubate our second batch of eggs the last few weeks. We did the same thing we did with the first, but had very different results. Our first hatch, we had 11 out of 14 eggs hatch and that was great. They eggs had been shipped over a couple states and they say a 50 % hatch rate with shipped eggs is really good. So for this hatch I bought some eggs that were more rare and more expensive and did everything else the same. I have checked these eggs over the last couple weeks (called candling) and thought all but a couple questionable ones were duds. Very disappointing considering they had been a little more pricey and I really wanted some of these in my flock. So last Thursday (which was technically hatch day, day 21) I am walking through the kitchen and I hear peeping. Leah was in there and I asked if she heard it also, sure enough she did. I was happy to see that the eggs werent a complete loss. By Friday morning, the peeping from inside the egg had lessoned and the chick had yet to make a pip.
I will spare you all the research I have done, but the basics of hatching is that a chick will pip a hole in the egg and zip a line completely around the egg and then push itself out. Many things can go wrong, but if you have a good humidity level and temperature in your incubator, it is usually best to let nature take it's course. My temps were good, but for some reason my humidity was a little low.
We woke up Saturday morning and the chick had pipped and was still peeping a little. I notices though that the membrane around the chick was very dry and somewhat shrink wrapping the chick. Not good. By 3:00 Saturday, the chick had made no more progress. It can take 12 hours for a chick to completely zip around the egg, but they usually make consistant progress. I decided, after much research, to intervene. I did not want to lose the one chick who was trying to make it, but often times intervening can do more harm than good. They can bleed to death and all kinds of ickiness can happen. We were fortunate and the E-section worked! We zipped the rest of the egg with a bamboo skewer and were very fortunate that the chick was ready to come out. It was indeed shrink wrapped in it's membrane and I am sure it would have died had we not intervened. Yeah!!
Julie
Friday, July 15, 2011
Poopies
I think potty training is in our near future. I have been working with Asher for a few months to recognize his "functions" if you will. Like if he pees on the floor after a bath, I will tell him that he went pee pee, that kind of stuff. Lately we have been working on poopy. Last weekend he told me he went poopy so I checked and I think he was confusing pee with poop, but I changed him. Just now though, he came up to me patting his bottom saying "poopy," and sure enough, he had. Yeah! I have no intentions of hitting this hard at this point, but I definitely think getting him familiar with the potty chair is in order. Go Asher, Go Asher, Go Asher!
Julie
Julie
Monday, July 4, 2011
15 years and a lost tooth!
July 20th marks 15 years that I have been married to my wonderful husband. In celebration of that, I swept him away for last week for a little trip. I have been planning this trip for months. Last Tuesday evening he came home to a treasure hunt of sorts that Leah and Logan had planned. Their were 15 clues with each clue having the number 15 in it. The last clue brought him to our bedroom where our bag was packed, t-shirts had been made (thank you cheap Vista Print deal) and tickets were displayed. We left 9 hours later for our flight to Bermuda. I have never done anything like this before and Ryan was caught so off guard that we had a hard time even reading whether or not he was even cool with it. He was and we had a wonderful time. We have never both left the kids for longer than a night so this was a very, very new thing for us. We were gone for 4 full days and 3 nights and got back late Saturday. The kids did great, which honestly was our greatest concern. Thank you to our super awesome babysitters (Eva and my in laws Rick and Deb) who kept them busy with activities and made it a lot of fun for mommy and daddy to be gone. Also, thanks to Leah and Logan for being a big help, I felt way more comfortable leaving knowing that they were there to lend a hand.
So, of course Bermuda was amazing. It has very quickly become one of my top places to visit. The flight was relatively short and I found tickets a couple months back for what I felt were pretty reasonable. We stayed in a mid range hotel which had everything we needed and we almost literally spent 3 days on a little motor scooter that we piddled around the island in. I will remember that trip for the rest of my life and I hope Ryan does too. Speaking of Ryan, I could not feel more blessed to be married to my best friend for 15 years. Really, I am in awe that I am able to spend my life with this man that I just keep loving more and more. I don't take this for granted.
Ok, so to change subjects, Anna lost her first tooth last night. She told us yesterday morning that is was loose and by about 11:00 pm it was out. I am still a little surprised by it all. Maddie is older and the only loose tooth she has was knocked loose. Anna was so proud and the tooth fairy left her a little green present under her pillow. **Sigh** I guess my babies are getting big......
Happy 4th all!! We will be taking the kids to see the Urbana fireworks tonight with my sisters and my mom and step dad. They should love that. Well, all except Asher. Surprisingly he doesn't seem to love the fireworks. I figured if for nothing else he would love how loud they were, but nope. We saw a few small ones last night and he laid his head against me the whole time. Hmph.
Julie
So, of course Bermuda was amazing. It has very quickly become one of my top places to visit. The flight was relatively short and I found tickets a couple months back for what I felt were pretty reasonable. We stayed in a mid range hotel which had everything we needed and we almost literally spent 3 days on a little motor scooter that we piddled around the island in. I will remember that trip for the rest of my life and I hope Ryan does too. Speaking of Ryan, I could not feel more blessed to be married to my best friend for 15 years. Really, I am in awe that I am able to spend my life with this man that I just keep loving more and more. I don't take this for granted.
Ok, so to change subjects, Anna lost her first tooth last night. She told us yesterday morning that is was loose and by about 11:00 pm it was out. I am still a little surprised by it all. Maddie is older and the only loose tooth she has was knocked loose. Anna was so proud and the tooth fairy left her a little green present under her pillow. **Sigh** I guess my babies are getting big......
Happy 4th all!! We will be taking the kids to see the Urbana fireworks tonight with my sisters and my mom and step dad. They should love that. Well, all except Asher. Surprisingly he doesn't seem to love the fireworks. I figured if for nothing else he would love how loud they were, but nope. We saw a few small ones last night and he laid his head against me the whole time. Hmph.
Julie
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